The Social Life Of Hagiography In The Merovingian Kingdom

This book shows how a set of great stories changed the political playing field in an early medieval society.

This book examines the political and social effects brought about by the establishment of Columbanian monasteries in seventh-century Gaul.

This book explores the Merovingian kingdoms in Gaul within a broader Mediterranean context. Their politics and culture have mostly been interpreted in the past through a narrow local perspective, but as the papers in this volume clearly demonstrate, the Merovingian kingdoms had complicated and multi-layered political, religious, and socio-cultural relations with their Mediterranean counterparts, from Visigothic Spain in the West to the Byzantine Empire in the East, and from Anglo-Saxon England in the North to North-Africa in the South. The papers collected here provide new insights into the history of the Merovingian kingdoms by examining various relevant issues, ranging from identity formation to the shape and rules of diplomatic relations, cultural transformation, as well as voiced attitudes towards the “other”. Each of the papers begins with a short excerpt from a primary source, which serves as a stimulus for the discussion of broader issues. The various sources' point of view and their contextualization stand at the heart of the analysis, thus ensuring that discussions are accessible to students and non-specialists, without jeopardizing the high academic standard of the debate.

Examines research from a variety of fields, including archaeology, bio-archaeology, architecture, hagiographic literature, manuscripts, liturgy, visionary literature and eschalology, patristics, numismatics, and material culture, Diverse list of contributors, many whose research has never before been available in English, Provides substantial research regarding women's history in the Merovingian period, Expands research beyond Europe to include other cultures that came in contact with the Merovingians Book jacket.

The twenty-one essays of Hagiography and the History of Latin Christendom, 500-1500 employ innovative methods to unlock the historical potential of hagiographical sources and reach new discoveries about the medieval world that extend well beyond the study of sanctity.

Queens, Consorts, Concubines offers an analysis of Gregory of Tours on issues including widowhood, marriage, sanctity, and political agency, offering a reinterpretation of elite women in Gaul (e.g. Brunhild, Fredegund, Radegund), related subjects (e.g. Merovingian marital policy), and Late Antiquity generally.

This interdisciplinary volume re-evaluates the interconnectedness of the Merovingian world with its Mediterranean surroundings.

This volume studies local priests as central players in small communities of early medieval Europe. As clerics living among the laity, priests played a double role within their communities: that of local representatives of the Church and religious experts, and that of owners of land and other goods. By virtue of their membership of both the ecclesiastical and the secular world, they can be considered as ‘men in the middle’: people who brought politico-religious ideas and ideals to secular communities, and who linked the local to the supra-local via networks of landownerhsip. This book addresses both roles that local priests played by approaching them via their manuscripts, and via the charters that record transactions in which they were involved. Manuscripts once owned by local priests bear witness to their education and expertise, but also indicate how, for instance, ideals of the Carolingian reforms reached the lowest levels of early medieval society. The case-studies of collections of charters, on the other hand, show priests as active members of networks of the locally powerful in a variety of European regions. Notwithstanding many local variations, the contributions to this volume show that local priests as ‘men in the middle’ are a phenomenon shared by the early medieval world as a whole.